But the episode did suggest to me something I had not been prepared before to recognize. When I went upstairs to Meg’s I always hoped Norma would be there. I had to acknowledge that to myself now, and with a weird feeling in the chest, some breathable excitement, as if I had done something terribly wrong although I didn’t know what it was. When the mother wasn’t home, or when she went out while I was there, I was disappointed. The visit became less interesting. She always smiled when she saw me. She had large eyes, widely spaced, and a wide mouth. She was very kind. Sometimes she joined us in our games. She would sit on the floor with us, and we three would have a good time.
NINETEEN
We received our first letter from the Paramount Hotel in the mountains. “Dear Mom, Dad, and Edgar,” wrote my brother in his orderly way, assigning to each the places we had in his mind. I admired Donald’s handwriting. He wrote in ink on unlined paper, and there were no blots and the lines were straight. One of my bad subjects in school was penmanship, and so I studied his letter and copied it out. I could hear his voice as I read, he was very good at explaining things—and I heard him now explaining how things were at the Paramount Hotel so that we would understand. He told us he was working hard and enjoying it. Some of the guests had requested tunes other than the ones the Cavaliers knew how to play—that was the biggest problem. People were getting tired of hearing the same songs every night. Could my father send up sheet music for a list of songs that was attached to the letter as quickly as possible? He would try to find time to rehearse, although it would be difficult because the management wanted them down by the lake during the day. Anyway the food was good, and he was getting a nice tan. It was a characteristic of the mountains that no matter how hot the day was the evenings were cool. My parents laughed over the letter, although I didn’t find anything particularly funny in it. My father said he would mail up some sheet music immediately, before the Cavaliers heard the gong. This was a reference to the Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, a radio program. Aspiring musicians were contestants on the program, and if they were no good, Major Bowes would ring a bell to stop their performance. It made you laugh even though it could not have been funny to whoever it was who might have been rehearsing for weeks to be heard on the radio and hoping to win a professional contract from the appearance. But it was funny. People played glasses of water each filled to a different height to make a different note; they played big ripsaws by bending the blade and stroking it with a violin bow; they played spoons, and even made music by tapping their teeth and slapping the sides of their face while their mouth was open. They always got the gong. One-man bands, my favorite, always got the gong. But I thought some of them were amazing—strumming guitars while blowing on harmonicas held on neck braces, or cornets affixed to their chairs, and beating bass drums with their feet, and playing organ chords with their elbows, and hitting cymbals with sticks taped to their foreheads. It was not real music they produced, these one-man bands, but something else, a mechanical not-quite-in-tune-music, like calliopes or music boxes; whenever I had the chance to listen to a one-man band I did.
My father explained to me that in the old days of vaudeville on the Lower East Side there was a fiddler named Romanoff who was famous for playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” while holding the violin behind his back. “The immigrants loved Romanoff, they thought he was the best violinist in the world because he could play the fiddle behind his back,” my father said. “Not even the great Heifetz could do that. Not even Fritz Kreisler.” He looked at me with a big smile on his face, his eyebrows poised while waiting for me to get the point. I understood what he was saying, but I still liked one-man bands.
A more serious matter arose regarding my brother when our former landlady, Mrs. Segal, came by to visit. As it happened, Mrs. Segal and her husband had gone to the Paramount Hotel for a week’s vacation and had been delighted to find Donald there. “But you wouldn’t believe the hovels they have those boys in,” she said. “Shacks, with mattresses on the floor, like dirt farmers. No running water, they have to use the outside shower beside the boathouse.”
My mother was speechless.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t say anything,” Mrs. Segal said, “but I know how particular you are.”
“He didn’t tell us,” my mother said.
“Of course not,” Mrs. Segal said, “You know boys, it doesn’t matter to them. They wouldn’t bathe if they lived in Buckingham Palace.” Mrs. Segal held my chin in her hand as she said that. She thought the whole situation very funny. “Of course Donald is having the time of his life,” she assured my mother. “He’s a big shot. All the girls adore him.”
When my father came home my mother told him what Mrs. Segal had said. “I want him home this instant,” she said. “He’s living in filth. Send him a telegram. I’ll go up there myself if that’s what it takes to get him out of that pigsty.”
“Rose,” my father said, “if you bring that boy home in the middle of the summer, he’ll never forgive you.”
It was difficult for my mother to control herself. After a day or two she wrote Donald a letter and said she had heard from Mrs. Segal about the living conditions of the staff. “Stand up for your rights,” she told him. “You’re just as good as the finest guest. Professional musicians have a right to expect sheets on the beds, at least.”
TWENTY
I had a theory about death in its various forms—for instance, drowning, being run over or burned alive, which were death by accident, or something like infantile paralysis, which was death by germ: It was simply that if I thought of it, if I imagined it, it would not happen to me. I would be guarded against it, made immune, merely by an act of thought, foiling this or that particular death with a mental inoculation against it. And it didn’t matter how the thought entered my mind, if I had heard of something terrible happening to someone else, or seen something bad, or just idly dreamt of the word describing it, I was safe. Perhaps it was not so much theory as a working hope, but it was holding up nicely.
In the fall of my eighth year I woke up one morning with one of my stomachaches. I was pleased to be allowed to stay home from school. I had a new comic book about Frank Buck, a real person. Frank Buck went to Africa and Asia and trapped big game; he didn’t kill animals, he brought them back by ship to the zoos and circuses. He was kind to the animals, which I liked. He had wild adventures.
My illness brought no theoretical thoughts to my mind. It didn’t seem at all consequential. Exhibiting the same aplomb with which I handled death, I regarded myself as an expert on illnesses, at least as they made their appearance in me. I knew my colds, my grippes, my earaches. I knew their characters and the courses they might take and the treatment they called for. They posed no fears for me, although they did for my mother. I had learned how secretly to avoid the worst treatment. Mustard plaster for chest colds for example: once it was applied and my mother had left the room, I would insert a towel between my skin and the brown bag paper in which the clammy English mustard had been spread. Then I would pull the covers up to my chin so I didn’t have to breathe the acrid fumes of the cursed detestable stuff. When I heard her coming back, I would remove the towel and suffer the burning sensation for as long as it took her to leave again.
This time I had a low fever, which was no particular inconvenience. I just didn’t eat very much. Everything was fine. But on the second day the mildly annoying ache was still there and I stayed in bed more of the time, a fact noted by my mother. In the late afternoon Dr. Gross came over and had a look at me. As usual he made me a present of some tongue depressors. He pressed my stomach and looked down my throat and in my ears while his vest chain swung with its hanging badge.
“Well,” he said in his genial growly voice, “it doesn’t appear to be much of anything. Let’s wait another day or two and see what happens.” This was not my mother’s usual inclination in the face of illness, she liked to know what it was and to deal with it firmly. But the symptoms were vague and I seemed to
be active enough even though in bed. I drew, listened to my programs, I demanded tea and toast and Jell-O with annoying regularity, and so she acceded to the doctor’s advice.
A couple of days later my stomach was still hurting and was tight as a drum. I went to bed early. When I awoke the next morning my stomach hurt no longer. I told this to my mother with a smile. She regarded my flushed cheeks. “I don’t like the way you look,” she said. When she read my temperature on the thermometer she gasped. It was a hundred and five degrees.
My mother cursed the name of Dr. Gross and called Aunt Frances in Westchester. As a well-to-do matron, Aunt Frances knew numbers of specialists. At her behest we received a phone call very soon afterward from a Dr. London, a friend of her family’s. I heard my mother describe the situation to him. She came back to my room with an alarmed expression on her face. “Dr. London is a Manhattan doctor,” she said. “He’s sending around an associate of his who has an office near here. He said you are not to move but to lie quietly with a pillow under your knees.” She placed the pillow very gently as she spoke. She was pale.
A short while later the associate arrived. I did not get his name. He scared me. He was not genial like Dr. Gross, but severe and unsmiling; he did not prod me about in Gross’s friendly way, kneading this and that, but touched me gingerly with the tops of his fingers and peered at me with a worried frown. He wore a dark blue pin-striped suit and vest. His hair was grey. “Dr. London’s suspicion was correct. This child must immediately go to the hospital,” he said to my mother. She put her hand to her cheek. They went out of the room together. I resented being left like that when it was me they were talking about. I heard them in the hallway.
The strange doctor spoke on the phone in the front hall and then spoke to my mother outside my room door. “You are not to waste time calling for an ambulance. Get a taxi. Take him to Poly Clinic hospital. It’s on West Fiftieth Street. Here is the address. Dr. London will be waiting.”
He explained to my mother how I should be carried, wrapped in a blanket, in a folded position, with as little room for movement as possible. Then he left.
My mother called her friend Mae for help. “His appendix has burst,” she said.
I was alarmed now because in my registry of self-protective thoughts I had never entered a burst appendix. How could I have, not knowing what it was! I felt light-headed. My fear dissolved and I became angry. The pain was gone and now was when I had to go to the hospital. I decided I would not go to the hospital. I complained bitterly while my mother put me in fresh pajamas and wrapped me in a blanket. She was uncharacteristically gentle but simply ignored what I had to say.
By this time Mae had arrived and was ringing the bell. A yellow De Soto cab was waiting at the curb in front of the house. My mother carried me down the steps and Mae ran ahead to hold the cab door. To my mortification there was the landlady’s little girl from downstairs, whom I hated. She was there in front of the house carrying her schoolbooks, watching the whole thing. She had no regard for my feelings but kept looking and looking, she hadn’t the decency to go about her business. I ignored her, but was furious with this wretched brat. Oh my awful luck, to be seen carried wrapped up in this way just at lunchtime when the children were coming home from school. How she knew. She would tell her mother. And my humiliation would be public knowledge.
That was the reason I cried in the taxi, not because I was feeling ill. “Shh,” my mother said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.” I could tell she was not entirely sure this was so. The cab was going very fast. The driver blew the horn repeatedly. I knew where we were, we were going down the Grand Concourse. I saw the tops of the trees on the center islands, the framed blue-and-white street signs attached to the lampposts, I saw the tops of the apartment houses. I was seeing the Bronx upside down. We kept going and crossed the bridge into Manhattan at 138th Street. I smelled the cracked leather of the cab’s upholstery, I saw the back of the driver’s head, his soft cap. I heard the ticking of the meter and tried to count the clicks, to keep time with them in my mind. I must have dozed. We were coming down Madison Avenue now from Seventy-ninth Street, there is a hill there and I twisted to look out front at the cars and buses. The driver blew the horn. The cab turned into Central Park and headed to the West Side of Manhattan.
I found myself on a stretcher in the hospital. My blanket was taken away. I was very thirsty. I twisted my head looking for my mother but I could not see her. I was being wheeled down a hall, the overhead lights ticking past like the ratchets of the taxi meter. “I am very thirsty,” I said, “I want some water, please.” Someone said, “In just one minute we’ll give you water.”
And then I was in an elevator with several people smiling at me and saying reassuring things. I didn’t know them. I didn’t believe them. Then we were out of the elevator in some dark room, and many people were there, indistinct shapes in the darkness, and the stretcher was being positioned in some way, and the movement back and forth was nauseating me. I was terribly thirsty and asked for water. Instead, straps were fastened around each of my wrists and my ankles and chest.
A doctor with a white cap on his head and a long white apron like Irving the Fish Man’s, appeared. I couldn’t see his face, he had on a mask covering everything except his eyes. He was saying something but his voice was muffled by the mask. He wore rubber gloves. I realized he was saying I was going to be all right. How could I trust him! I had no control over what they were doing to me. They had tied me down. They did not seem to hear when I said I wanted something to drink.
Another doctor in a white cap sat down next to my head and said he was going to put a mask over my face and he wanted me to breathe very deeply when he did. “Let me see the mask,” I said. He held up not a white cloth mask such as he wore, but a conical rubber device, colored black, whose sides were collapsed on each other, the narrow end attached to a tube. It looked more like a balloon than a mask. I knew beyond question that I wanted nothing to do with it. He saw the alarm in my eyes. He lifted the mask toward me and turned away at the same time and turned a wheel on some kind of machine I had not noticed before that was sitting next to him. I heard a hissing sound. The mask as it came toward me was now a perfect circle. I knew I could not avoid it but turned my head from side to side anyway. I wanted a moment to compose myself. “Just breathe deeply,” he said. “Can you count? Count from one hundred as you breathe, but backwards, see if you can, ninety-nine, ninety-eight and so on,” and he clasped it over my face. I was shaking my head no. I tried to tell him I was thirsty. I wanted two things, a glass of water and a moment to compose myself, but I could not speak because the hideous rubbery mask was clamped over my face and held there. I couldn’t breathe, I was trying to tell him. A cold sweet poisonous gas was what this man wanted me to breathe. I tried to get him to stop. I had something to say. I began to struggle and felt hands holding me down. Whichever way I turned my head the cold sweet suffocating poison stuck to me. I was breathing it, I couldn’t help it, I tried to hold my breath but it was impossible, and with each breath I took, more of this unbreathable sweetness was coming into my lungs and choking me. I gagged. It was not air. It was cold, it smelled like the hiss of gas in a cellar, it had echoes in it, it rang like metal footsteps, it hissed, cell doors clanged shut, I heard my voice calling to me down long stone corridors, I could not breathe. I knew I must not lose consciousness. I fought. I shook my head, I could not free myself.
And now great swirls of colored light advanced toward me, spinning like pinwheels, revolving so fast they seemed to scream. And then the light was splintering and flying toward me, needles of it stinging me, flying past me, yellow and red stings, and now a roaring sound filled my head and began to pulsate. And all this swirling light and roaring screaming noise popped into Donald Duck looming up from a point, and he spoke and clacks came out of his mouth, and then Mickey Mouse loomed up in front of me and made horrible faces, and spoke in clacks or roars, and they were laughing at me and shakin
g their fists and showing their teeth. And I couldn’t help it, now I was breathing in this terrible gas in a white tiled swimming pool or corridor whose walls moved in toward me and then outwards. I was falling through my Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia article on the sea and these underwater animals were laughing in my ears, but the laughter pulsated like a machine, and I couldn’t stop breathing even though I knew it was the machine breathing. The smell was cold, the hiss grew softer. I felt as if I were under the sea but breathing under the sea somehow this air that was the only thing left to breathe in all this cold floating. And then, with a certainty that made me scream, I knew I was being cut, I felt the knife go into my belly and cut downward. I tried to tell them to stop, but water hissed into my mouth and I saw myself drifting away and they cut and cut, and I wanted to cry but could not, the tears remained in my throat and in my throat I grieved, and felt such despair of death that I gave up and I let it come floating. And it all floated away.
Then, much later it seemed, I saw things for a while and then no longer saw them. It was quiet. I heard voices but could not distinguish words. My mouth was dry. When I called for water, a wet piece of cotton was brushed across my cracked lips. I was angry and came into consciousness kicking. That they would tie me to a table and force me to breathe what I couldn’t breathe! I was held down, Donald was holding my hand, he was saying, “Take it easy, take it easy!” I went to sleep and awoke, quite clear in the head now. I was in some sort of room with curtains. Others were outside the curtains. They had their own concerns. Children were crying. The curtain was pulled back and a nurse showed me how I could have water. She took a tongue depressor with cotton wrapped around one end and dipped it into a glass of water and then let me suck the water from the cotton. It was not enough, but she would only give me it that way.
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